More Nice Snow Leopard Refinements: Now With 20% Less Pestering!

Snow Leopard (MacOS X 10.6) really doesn’t offer a whole lot of new features. But some of the refinements, such as the AirPort “searching” ping! are just plain nice.

Before 10.6, clicking the eject button next to a mounted volume in the Finder’s Sidebar yielded no action until the volume was actually ejected. And if something was using a file on that disk, it would warn you about that fact and then do nothing. You just wasted two clicks.

Now, if you click the eject button, the volume is immediately grayed out. And it stays that way until it’s not busy anymore, at which point it gets ejected. Or “put away,” if you remember that terminology.

Updated: Aw, crud. Turns out I was wrong about that busy thing. Finder still insists on telling you that you just wasted a click. Poop.

And when a server gets disconnected, as often happens when I go from LAN to VPN mode, you can tell MacOS to ignore the fact that it lost the connections to those volumes, as shown below.